Islam has tamed a lawless Somalia, but is it raising an African Taliban?

[N.O.R.F]

By Colin Freeman in Mogadishu

 

(Filed: 08/10/2006)

Page 1 of 5

As a senior drill officer for Somalia's new Islamic army, Col Abukar Sheikh Mohamed is proud to have recruited some of the unholiest warriors ever to grace a parade ground.

Marching over the sandy strip in front of him are former members of Mogadishu's notorious warlord militias, the drug-crazed freelance killers, robbers and rapists who have brought anarchy to the capital for the past 16 years.

Now, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a new religious movement which drove out the warlords two months ago, is "rehabilitating" them to defend the land that they so spectacularly destroyed.

"Discipline is the first priority," said Col Abukar, as 50 pairs of flip-flopped feet slapped past him in unsteady goosesteps. "These men worked for the warlords – some were alcoholics, others chewed or smoked drugs all day. But, now we have taught them the Islamic religion, they cry about their past sins and obey only the word of God. They do not even smoke cigarettes."

Their murderous backgrounds aside, the ragtag army at the Hilwenye training camp outside Mogadishu does not look much of a fighting machine. Some are elderly, others in their teens, some have limps and several are minus hands or ears. Even one of their drill sergeants sports a bandage where his nose was blown off by a bullet.

But on their final marchpast over the parade ground, a chant goes up that has rung alarm bells, not just among Somalia's neighbours, but across the globe.

It is "Allah akhbar", or "God is great", the traditional religious call that has been adopted as a battle cry by Islamic warriors all over the Muslim world.

Thirteen years after the infamous "Black Hawk Down" incident, in which 18 American troops died at the hands of a Mogadishu mob, Somalia is once again the stuff of American nightmares - as a potential new home for fundamentalist Islam in Africa.

The ICU's critics in London and Washington see the movement as little short of an African Taliban, an alliance of sharia court judges whom they accuse of wanting to turn Somalia into a theocratic state.

But on the wrecked streets of Mogadishu, residents seem more than willing to give the rule of God a try - if only for the reason that, in living memory, no mere mortal has come anywhere close to doing the job properly.

After 20 years under the Marxist dictator Siad Barre, during which Somalia became first a Soviet and then a Western client state, a fierce territorial battle with Ethiopia saw it disintegrate into civil war and famine by 1992. A subsequent US and United Nations-backed peacekeeping and relief mission, involving 30,000 troops and $4 billion in aid, was abandoned two years later, leaving a power vacuum which the warlords quickly filled.

Now the ICU has garnered unprecedented support for managing to do what none of its predecessors could achieve - pacifying the most lawless city in the world.

The courts first emerged as an informal source of law and order in the mid-1990s, gaining respect partly by their imposition of ruthless sharia punishments such as amputations, but also by their reputation for fairness. Influential local businessmen, sick of militia extortion rackets, then paid for men and arms to enforce the courts' writs.

That culminated in a series of spectacular battles earlier this year, in which the courts, supported by many of the capital's one million citizens, cleared out the warlords, district by district. Since June a tangible, if fragile, calm has reigned, as shown by the casualty sheets at Mogadishu's Medina hospital: the number of gunshot wound admissions is down to fewer than 30 a month, from a high of 179 in February.

"In the last month a new sense of life has come to the business," said Abdullah Noor, 22, an accountant in a Mogadishu haberdashery. "We even feel safe enough to open at night. There may be Islamists who are extremists, yes, but the majority are okay. One hand controlling things is better than many."

Other aspects of the new regime are less welcome. As traditionally secular Muslims, many Somalis have been worried at how the courts have tried to shut down cafés showing Bollywood films and football matches, stop radio stations playing love songs, and encourage women to wear veils.

They also wonder what else goes on at training camps like Hilwenye, where several hours a day are devoted to Koranic studies. While the ICU says it is simply creating a new national defence force, others see a potential jihadi breeding ground.

Whatever its ultimate agenda, the ICU's popularity has been shored-up immeasurably by strong suspicions that America - which claimed the courts were a Trojan horse for al-Qaeda - backed the warlords in a bid to prevent the Islamists seizing power.

Across the border in neighbouring Djibouti is the US Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa, a 2,000-strong force set up after September 11, specifically to prevent Islamic fundamentalism leeching into the continent's failed and nearly failing Muslim states. While Washington has never admitted it publicly, the CIA is widely acknowledged to have funded the warlords with cash to buy weapons, fearing the ICU would turn Somalia into what President George W Bush described as a "safe haven for al-Qaeda".

Ahmed Abdisalam Adan, director of broadcasting at Hornafrik Media, a popular Mogadishu radio station, believes the reports he broadcast from the city's then-thriving weapons souk were more than just rumours.

"All of a sudden in 2005 loads of cash flooded into the weapons market, thousands of new dollar bills all in sequence. The warlords were buying guns from the Yemen, Ethiopia and elsewhere. Somalis are very open about this kind of thing, and the warlords quite happily told people where their money was coming from."

The real truth will probably never be ascertained, and Washington declines to comment, but in a country where perception counts as much as anything else, the damage has already been done. US interests in Somalia are now indelibly associated with the warlords, who were widely loathed for their criminality, while the triumph of an Islamist movement is associated with the arrival of a much-longed for peace.

It has also allowed them to trump the credibility of Somalia's transitional federal government, a 275-strong UN-backed body elected by clan elders in 2004. While it enjoys international legitimacy, its members have never felt it safe enough to take up their seats in Mogadishu. Instead, they languish in exile in the provincial town of Baidoa, where the ICU accuses them of plotting to get Ethiopian or foreign peacekeeping troops to put them in power.

"The Islamic Courts Union has the support of the Mogadishu people now, but we don't," admitted Ahmed Mohamed, a federal government parliamentarian. The rivalries between the two groups threaten to spark a regional crisis, with ICU troops taking control of towns and ports outside Mogadishu and nearing the sensitive borders with Ethiopia and Kenya.

The ICU's leader is Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, an elderly man with a red henna-dyed goatee, glasses and skull cap. While he makes no apology for his view that an Islamic state is the only way to discipline an unruly land like Somalia, he strongly denies extremism or links to al-Qaeda. Most of his new laws, he insists, are sensible regulations in a city that badly needs them; the much-talked of cinema closures, for example, were of hardcore porn shows that children were being allowed to view.

"We are not the Taliban, and we should be given some credit for what we have done," he said. "We don't want labels, we want help." Despite his popularity on the streets of Mogadishu, the help Sheikh Aweys wants in rebuilding the country may be some way off long as he remains a key player. The Foreign Office, whose representatives will attend EU-backed talks between the ICU and the transitional government in Kenya this week, says it can do business with "more moderate" ICU members but not with him.

"The ICU has brought an element of stability to the country, but they offer a type of rule that is neither democratic nor pluralistic," said a spokesman. "Sheikh Aweys is not someone we can work with. We have to be principled as well as pragmatic." Principles, however, are something that ordinary Mogadishu residents say they can no longer afford. "Unfortunately, you cannot use Western judgements in Mogadishu reality," said Abdullai Mohamed Shirna, a local charity worker.

"If an Islamist militia whips an old woman, you in the West will be horrified. Here, people will say that is minor compared with the rapes by warlords. Why does the West only worry now, when it never cared in the warlords' time?"

[Haashim]

Why does the West only worry now, when it never cared in the warlords' time?"

 

very true

[nuune]

^^^^ lool fadhi ku dirirka Qanyare iyo asxaabtiisa, the report I was reading about Qanyare yesterday was saying ninkan Qanyare mashquul ayuu waligiis ahaa oo qofkii raba inuu arko dhib bey ku noqon jirtey, hadase guriga Xaabsade ayuu ku jiraa ee Baydhabo anyone can drop and see him by just coming to the house and you meet the old man playing TURUB.

 

 

Norf, good article indeed

[Haashim]

Nuune, Dayniile.com xitaa waa illoobay Qanyare

Mar dambana ma dhaho beesha Karanle ee woqooyiga America oo go'aan ku gaartay iwm..

 

I wonder when the new one (Barre Hiiraale) will join his team and Gedonet will forget him and will stop beesha **** oo ku shirtay Ohio iwm?

[nuune]

^^^^ loooooooooool waraa innaba caadi ma tihid, waa runtaa Dayniile.com wey deyriyeen saaxiibkood qaaliga ahaa, laakin ninka maxaa dhigey beydhabo, ma go'doon buu ku noqdoo hanti buusan meel dhigan, ninka Barre ahaa wuu tumanayaa toobtuu dillaacsadey wax uu takhaantikhiyuu rabaa isaga unbaan ka yaabi iney tallaabada la gadoonto ceebina ka soo raacdo, bal aan eegno!